March 20, 2008

Phytoplankton and zooplanktons

I have been culturing phytoplankton and a few different zooplankton for a number of years. It’s quite easy to culture phytoplankton and rotifers.

This is what my culture stand looks like:

I have three different types of phytoplankton: nannochloropsis, tetraselmis, and isochrysis.

I use a wide mouth 1-liter water bottle with a rigid air line for an individual culture bottle:

I have six pairs of culture bottles. Every morning I take one of the pair and divide the content into two clean culture bottles. I top off each bottle with salt water (s.g.: 1.021) and add 0.4 ml of Micro Algae Grow fertilizer. Then I put the cap on the bottles and insert two rigid airlines to aerate the bottles. I then feed my zooplankton by pouring the content of the other bottle from the pair into their culture containers.

Hi,
I suppose that you can culture some phytoplankton in a fishpond. I know that a number of people does that with Japanese chlorella in fresh water in order to feed daphnia. I am not familiar with P. vannamei shrimp. You might be able to find some help at Live-food mailing list :http://fins.actwin.com/live-foods/
Good luck,
Tomoko